Sociocultural Strategies for a Dialogue of Cultures by Savignon & Sysoyev

This article focused on the fact that we really need to practice and explicitly teach sociocultural ways of communication. Besides learning a language to speak to people from other cultures, we also need to act as diplomats of our own cultural and have open minds and engage in a dialogue of cultures. Socio cultural strategies were defined in the article as "techniques used for establishing and maintaining international contact in the spirit of peace and dialogue of cultures. The article outlined 7 different strategies.
The term "dialogue of cultures" was defined by Bakhtin and Bibler. They state the dialogue is the very essence of humanity and mutual understanding. Culture is a "concentration of all other meanings of human existence. Culture can been seen as a special form or link of interaction between civilizations or epochs. Seen in this way, culture can only exist in the special relationships between past, present, and future in the history of mankind.
There was a study conducted in a Russian school of students of high level English. They were all explicitly taught the strategies and given surveys to fill out. They all found the strategies to be useful and could see themselves using these strategies. Because they all had different characteristics and personalities they rated the strategies very differently on the easiest and hardest and most useful.
This was a pretty long article and hard to follow at times, but in the end after reviewing my notes, I found it to be interesting. I think this is a really good point that along with language skills, diplomatic/sociocultural skill need to be taught as well. I think that having these strategies is just as important as having langauge skills. When going to another place you do need to have an open mind and be in the "spirit of peace". This will not only further you ability to communicate, it will also further your knowledge of the culture. I really agree with what Savignon and Sysoyev are trying to portray in the article. I like this idea and I think teachers in langauge classrooms sound really make an effort to teach these 7 different sociocultural strategies.